


Eddie Isn't Dead

by colish3



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alice Isn't Dead - Freeform, But He's a Washed-Up Stand Up Comedian, But I Don't Know if It Can Help Us, F/M, Finding a Way to Cope with Trauma, Fix-It of Sorts, Healing, M/M, Post-Canon, Reddie, Richie Tozier Has a Sister, The Turtle Is Real, What Did You Expect, canon-typical horror elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:53:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22538080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/colish3/pseuds/colish3
Summary: Eddie isn’t dead. That’s the most important thing, the only thing really. Richie wants to scream it from the rooftops, to call everyone he knows and tell them to put their phone on speaker, volume all the way up. But he can’t, so he writes it on a script and reads it like a lie instead. Richie wonders if Eddie would be proud: he’s writing his own material for once.Pseudo “Alice Isn’t Dead” Au where Richie sees Eddie on a news broadcast and then another and then another, always at the scene where bad things happen, always watching. So Richie decides to pack up his whole life and search for Eddie, documenting everything in a fiction podcast in hopes that someone will know it’s not fiction. To those who know, there has to be a way to get someone back.
Relationships: Ben Hanscom/Beverly Marsh, Beverly Marsh & Richie Tozier, Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier, Patricia Blum Uris/Stanley Uris, Richie Tozier & Patricia Blum Uris
Comments: 9
Kudos: 29





	1. A Change in Careers

**Author's Note:**

> This has horror elements, so this chapter has very brief mentions of: natural disasters, alcohol abuse, death & child death, and suicide. 
> 
> this is an edited version of the first. I changed a few parts that I just felt like I could do better, but nothing that altered the plot in any meaningful way. Also I changed the manager's name to Steve because I read the book since I first put it out and I liked that name better. 
> 
> I hope you all enjoy!

There were better ways to do this. The idea of making a fiction podcast out of the death of a loved one seems cheap, but after four decades of bad “Your Mom” jokes, Richie has settled into his niche of cheap well. Besides, it’s not like Eddie can curse him from beyond the grave if he’s still here.

Bill first learns about the upcoming podcast via a tweet on Richie’s main account. Richie expected him to be mad. Who makes a drastic career change to become a fiction writer and lets their friend, specifically their award-winning author friend, find out over Twitter? Richie apparently. But he isn’t. Instead, Bill calls congratulating him on the new project and offering help if he gets stuck on any plot lines. “Writer’s block’s a bitch,” and Bill is more than willing to help out. 

That is, until he read the description. For the rest of that day, Richie blocks Bill’s calls. Then all the Losers call. The four of them agree: he needs to let this go. Richie won’t—can’t, they have to know that. But Richie assures them that he’s gone through all the stages of grief and made it out to acceptance just fine. Years of going out on stage every night talking about the hot girlfriend he fucked every night—you know, the one who caught him masturbating to her friend’s Facebook page—prepared him well. He’s been lying his whole life, one phone call means nothing. 

“Everyone heals differently,” he starts. “I don’t know. People who aren’t us in place that weren't Derry going through the same shit. I don’t want that but it’s the idea. They had to forget this shit to, its not just us, and it just feels less fucking lonely that way. Eddie’s gone.” He chokes on that line. “I know I can’t save him, but maybe I can save this one guy, in this one story. Is that so bad? I’m just trying to heal.” Lying to his friends, It’s as easy as saying he fucked all their moms.

“If you think it’s going to help you.” “We’re here for you.” “You can heal, we all will.” “Yeah, that’s right. You can make it through this, Richie.” They all say.

They believe him more than they did as kids, every time he said he fucked their moms. Maybe he’s gotten better with age. 

“As long as you know it’s not real,” none of them say. 

After receiving his greenlight from the Losers, Richie goes back to working on the podcast. The process would be easier with an actual writer to check his script or a librarian to help with the research or someone who knew what the fuck may be going on. But they couldn’t know. 

\---

For a period, Richie watched T.V. every day, never changing the channel. He sat, and he laid, letting it wash over him. There was a time, specifically beginning at the advent of the iphone, in which Richie never made it through a movie without checking his phone at least once, if not on it the entire time. As it turns out, one learns a lot when actually watching. For example: infomercials get their name for a reason. They truly provide so much information. 

Around two o’clock pm on a Wednesday, Richie woke up on the couch to reports of an accident on Fox. An earthquake took out part of a school, not the whole thing, just two classrooms. A support beam cracked and the roofs fell. Richie’s face scrunched up in horror, his mouth open but taking in no air. Thirty-two children died, but that’s not what horrified him. In the background, watching, was Eddie, so far in the back that Richie barely saw. 

What the hell was Eddie doing there? What possible reason could Eddie be in, he checked the banner at the bottom, Emporium, Pennsylvania? How the fuck did he even get there, why would he be there, what was he thinking? His face wasn’t in focus enough for Richie to even see the look on it. All of that crossed Richie’s mind before he even thought to ask, “How is Eddie alive.”

For three days, Richie stayed up. He bought Direct TV so he could watch on his laptop, brought his office desktop into the living room, unmounted the screen in his bedroom to put in front of the couch. Three news reports going live at all times, and the living room TV, the one meant to be there, perpetually stuck on Fox. He watched all of them, even when Fox stopped playing the news, as if Eddie could find his way into a  _ Simpsons _ episode. If anyone could... But maybe he could materialize in a commercial.

Eddie made no appearance. At first, Richie thought the lack of sleep answered why he couldn’t see him. Day two-point-five, as he marked it, still brought nothing, making it the first time Richie realized that all this could be a waste of time, an idiotic way to work out trauma. Crack of dawn on day three, and he remembered how small the man was in comparison to the screen, his features barely picked up by the HD. For Richie to even assume the man to be Eddie was presumptuous. He was just a random observer in the background not even in focus of the shot. Even if it was Eddie, there was no way Richie would be able to tell.

Except, that was bullshit. Richie knew him through blurry eyes with his glasses kicked off; knew him through quiet footsteps as he took running start to tackle Richie into the dirt; knew him through laughter hidden behind longwided, disapproving lectures; through silence when Eddie just breathed next to him. Knew him as he stopped breathing.

Two o’clock struck. On the tiny laptop screen, standing in the background, a news broadcast showed Eddie again. Kanab, Utah this time. Three kids got lost hiking, and their phones ran out of battery. Richie didn’t want to hear the rest, just wanted to see Eddie, but he needed to know. With thousands of miles between Pennsylvania and Utah, no possible reason existed for this to be any kind of coincidence. Too full of the image—Eddie, there, breathing, alive—to look away and get a pen, Richie committed everything to memory. Beneath the tragedy playing out, Richie savored every pixel, every fraction of a second the network allowed this story airtime.

The report cut back to the newscaster, and Richie snapped out of it, running to get something to write with. No time for mourning the loss of Eddie from sight, Richie penciled everything to paper, then thought. Richie’s epoch of misery ended then. For the first time in days, he stopped being a passenger and thought. 2,137 miles, 32 hours by car, 25 with Eddie behind the wheel, no direct flights. Richie forgot to factor in sleep. Tragedy connected them, nothing else. Scratch that, small towns, both reports took place in small towns. The fact that they were even covered by big networks seemed improbable. Still, the connection worked.

Despite being founded in only 1998, Google remained one of Richie’s closest and oldest friends, sans Losers of course. Fuck. The Losers. They’d gotta hear about this. They needed to know. But dragging them back, giving hope with no proof, that would be cruel. Instead, Richie went back to googling. He’d call later, with proof, and he would find proof. 

The sentence “Small town child death” looked bad in any search history. Being a comedian, and therefore technically a writer, excused many an odd google. Still, he may want to clear his search history. Regardless, “Small town child death” garnered results in myriads. Every link with a youtube attachment, every clip on an article, every photo of every tragedy Richie searched.

Eddie was there, in North Dakota. An electrical fire killed four, and he stood there in the background of the shot. As the reporter talked, he just watched the camera. Missouri, Oklahoma, California. He watched. A car was dug out of a river, a mother and daughter drowned inside. A small town, again, and death. Eddie watched. 

Richie bookmarked every video. 

\---

Two months left before the podcast launched, Richie still had a “shit ton” of research to do. Basic outlines were drawn, the episode was good enough, but where to go from there stuck high in the air. He researched the same way Mike did but, you know, without stealing indigenous property and relics. What the fuck, Mike. But he runs out—only so many books on dead clowns and histories of murdered children. Especially without Mike to help with resources.

In searching, and Richie doesn’t tell Bill this, he reads his books. In fact, he reads all of them. Every book is the same; each time, a group of children hide together, each time, people come together to fight a monster, each time, the endings suck. Richie debates telling Bill that last point, but that would mean copping to the fact that he read the books. As far as Bill is concerned, Richie doesn’t know how to read. 

Even without his memories, without even knowing the Losers existed, Bill wrote them. Somehow, somewhere, strange things must be happening. It can’t only be them; someone else must have forgotten. So Richie buys a fucking kindle and camps out in a library and singlehandedly keeps the LA Barnes & Noble alive and kicking.

Richie reads more than a few books before working his way to some YA book. So what if it’s a book made for tweens? Richie’s a college drop out. Let it go.

He only makes it through one chapter, until he comes across haunting words.

“There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit… Either you’re his true love, or you killed him.”

Richie shuts the book.

He doesn’t know what he expected out of it, but Jesus Christ. Even Bill’s books aren’t that cheesy, and he has not-Bev fall for his obvious self insert. That is just bad writing. Still perturbed, Richie moves on to another book, then another, just looking to find something more.

As he investigates, as he writes, as he connects the literal dots with pink yarn, he names it podcast research, and he christens it fiction. He could never tell the Losers, not again.

\----

Four months and thirteen days ago, Richie called them. He called them, one after another, only saying one thing before hanging up: “Eddie Isn’t Dead.” 

It would have been helpful to have Mike come. All twenty-three years after the first Loser left, he studied text after sacred text in that Library. If anyone knew what to do, it was him. But Mike was in Michigan looking at the Great Lakes, and Ben and Bev were closer.

When he answered the door, after the original comfort of just seeing them left, he noticed Ben’s face drop. Bev had always been better at hiding her emotions. It struck Richie that he forgot to clean. When he turned around, he saw what they saw. His apartment was dark with two TV’s and a desktop and a laptop arranged at all angles of the coffee table and milk crate he brought in to fit what he couldn’t on the table. The stacked pizza boxes weren’t a good look, nor was the blanket falling off the couch. Even worse was the nasty bong on his living room chair that spilled out its water onto the rug long ago and the bottles hidden precariously through the house. Most hadn’t made it into the trash can just yet. Or the recycling. Hey, Richie recycled.

Understanding the face Ben made, he cringed slightly. Again, not a good look. But he ushered them inside telling them not to mind the mess. And then he explained it. A lot of small information needed to be crammed into a large story, but he managed to convey it alright. Out with the story came an air of hope, each one of them hoping beyond hope that Eddie could be alive. But buried in all that was concern, and that concern bled doubt. They didn’t believe him, yet. 

It was okay. Richie knew that would happen. That's why he had proof, fourteen videos and news reports bookmarked. He ran to his laptop bringing it to the entryway where Ben and Bev still stood. He clicked the first link, but nothing popped up. The internet was just slow. It happens. He took it off the wifi, reconnected, “connection failure”. 

That was okay also. Richie planned in case that happened. That was why he had them all bookmarked on his desktop, too. Sure, the three of them on the couch as he crouched over trying to connect made for an awkward squeeze . ABC news wouldn’t load. One sight had been taken down; Kanab was a tourist town, so they didn’t want it on their site. The youtube video got taken down for copyright infringement. This always fucking happened. Richie’s hands started to shake, and he went to his history page searching for one last anything.

He heard Bev suck in a breath. Yeah, yeah it looked bad. But one picture was still up. 

“Look. Look. It’s him.” Richie pointed to the screen. “That’s Eddie, right there.”

“Richie,” Ben said.

“Ben,” Richie said back.

“Richie, look at me.”

“No. No. You need to look at the screen, not me. He’s there. I’m telling you he’s there.” Richie didn’t turn his head, but he knew Ben wasn’t looking.

Fine, they didn’t believe him. He got it. It’s hard to believe with just one photo, but he had one video saved to his computer. He didn’t want to show it. Eddie... he didn’t look good in it. 

Kent, Connecticut. Two boys hung themselves in the dorm. That report was from October, the oldest report Richie found. Eddie’s cheek was still swollen, red where the wound made its best effort to close. His blue polo was stained a wet brown right by the chest. He was crying. Obviously, Eddie had freaked out before: yelled, screamed, whispered, but Richie had seen Eddie cry twice in his life. And even then, if he ever crossed him with puffy eyes, Eddie would yawn and rub them away saying he couldn’t sleep. Eddie wouldn’t want to be seen like this.

“Richie,” Bev said, so softly he almost didn’t hear it.

“No.”

“Richie,” Bev started to say something else.

“No. Eddie is right there.” he argued back, talking over her. “Right there. Don’t you see him?” He was yelling now, didn’t notice it until half way through, but he couldn’t stop.

“He’s not,” Ben said.

“Come on, Haystacks, use your fucking eyes. Right there,” He pointed at the screen. “Right there between the blonde chick and the dude with the glasses.”

“He’s not there,” Ben said more firmly this time, and Richie couldn’t handle it.

He smacked the table, finally turning around. Fine, he’d look at them. “How can you not see it? Do you just not want to see Eddie, is that it?”

Beverly didn’t say anything.

Where Beverly was quiet, Ben started to raise his voice, not loud, not yelling, just enough for Richie to hear over the pounding behind his ears. “Richie. He isn’t there.” He touched the screen, putting a hand on Richie’s back to ease him back to facing front.

“Don’t touch me.” Richie smacked his hand away. But Richie looked and Eddie was so small standing there, just like the faces of the parents. There was no way he should be able to see Eddie crying from there. Eddie’s face was all but blurred out on the monitor. “Fuck.” Richie stood up, pacing.

“Richie, we loved him, too,” Ben continued.

“Shut up.” He wouldn’t stop.

“He’s dead. Eddie is dead.”

“Shut the fuck up.” 

Richie punched a wall. 

A moment passed, then pain. All he felt was pain. Fuck, he probably broke his hand. No longer feeling like talking, no longer feeling like screaming, he turned around and saw them. Ben was standing, too, looking on the verge of crying, and Bev was sitting on the couch, stock still. 

“Bev.” She just sits there, face purposely blank, a mask made impenetrable. “Bev, I’m sorry. Shit, I’m sorry.” Richie turns. “Ben, I’m…” The words don’t come. 

Ben makes his way to him, first slowly, hands out a little like walking to a scared dog. 

“I’m-”

And in a moment, Ben is there, holding him steady. 

“I’m-” It comes out wobbly.

“I know.” He pats his back, once. “I know.”

All Richie could think about was how it was so nice that Ben is 6’1, same as him. He didn’t have to crouch, didn’t have to fall, just stood there and be held. He felt cold. 

By the time he was done crying, Bev was there, taking him out of Ben’s arms with the couch blanket in her hands. Richie thought about how weird it was for him of all people to have a specifically “couch blanket.”  _ Afghan _ , he thought. Like, sure he was rich, but still, who would have expected him of all people to own a couch blanket. It’s out of character. As Bev led him back to sit down, he didn’t not think about what it meant that he slept with only a couch blanket, not a comforter, not even a full length blanket, for so many nights.

\---

There’s a reason he never tells the Losers. Not because they won’t believe him—not in a thousand years for that excuse—but because when he looked back at trying to tell them, he only sees Bev.

\----

When he woke up, Ben was gone, most likely asleep in the guest bed. He had driven the whole way to Richie’s. Bev was still up though, stroking his hair knowing he still wasn’t ready to get up. 

“You’re not the only one, you know,” she said.

“What do you mean?” asked Richie.

“We all have to heal,” Bev explained, sage but hard to believe.

“You’re healing?”

“I’m healing.”

“What are you doing? Like therapy?”

“Yes.” She said, matter of fact. “It’s helpful.”

“So you’re telling me you went to see a therapist.” 

She nodded. 

“You just walked in and went, ‘So an alien clown killed two of my friends recently. It’s almost okay because we killed it back, but it also killed a shit ton of people when we were kids, and that childhood trauma is really sticking with me.”

“Yes, Richie, that’s exactly what I did.”

“And they didn’t lock you up in a loony bin?

Bev just gave him a look. “I didn’t tell my therapist about a killer clown. Just the basics. I lost two friends recently, and I was reminded of a childhood trauma that I forgot. And that childhood trauma has followed me throughout my whole adult life.”

“Okay, so how did you explain the two decades of memory loss?”

“I kinda skirted around that topic.”

“Okay, what did the therapist say?” asked Richie, waving his hands above his face as he looked up at her. “Just give me the recaps. This is like free therapy.”

Beverly looked at him with her lips pursed in an attempt to keep from smiling. “You’re rich. You know that right? I need you to know this.”

“That money can dry up at any time,” Richie explained, no longer blinking away sleep, “Never know when the next economic collapse may hit.”

“I promise.” Beverly said sincerely, “When you have to live in a box because you wasted all your money on therapy, I’ll come help you decorate.” 

“Thanks for the offer, but don’t worry. I’m like a cockroach. I’ll survive eating twinkies from a dumpster behind the factory. Wait, you didn’t offer to feed me.” Bev laughed for the first time since he’d seen her. “Okay, I’ll take you up on the interior design offer.” He smiled at her. “But actually, what did your therapist say? I’m not kidding about the free therapy.”

And so she told him. At night sometimes, she got up just to flush the toilet, not go pee or anything, just flush. “We’re in a drought, Bev.” In that case, sometimes she flushed it twice. At night, the sound felt so much louder. At first, it was terrifying, being so loud. It might wake Ben up. But then, nothing happened, and she flushed it again. She goes on. Last week, she set the microwave for one minute and thirty-one seconds, and she let it go the entire time and didn't even open it when it beeped. 

When Richie joked about wasting water and electricity, Bev shot back, “Save yourself or save the world, Rich.” Like so many things that pass between them, it was only half a joke. 

While he had slept they called Mike and Bill letting them know what happened. As they told it, Eddie was still dead, and Richie just had a breakdown. Been there, done that; all of them. Ben and Bev left two days later.

After, though, the Losers called him constantly, each at least once a week. Sometimes he answered the phone to one of them everyday. Somewhere in these phone calls, he could have asked Mike. Two decades in a library, he had to know something, but he didn’t. All he accomplished from telling them would be worrying everyone and scaring his friends. Fuck. He wouldn’t scare Beverly again. He saw the way she froze when he punched the wall, and he would never be the reason she had to flush a toilet twice, just proving that she could. 

So for three months, he worked alone, reading everything the same way he assumes Mike did.

\----

While he writes, Richie attempts to pepper in just enough truth to remind anyone of the cause. Each place he plans to visit, circled on the seventeen maps decorating his walls, Richie attempts to find a new name for, but needs to keep the truth. The fine line between fact and fiction, which starts with the hiding of Eddie, needs to end with only those who have never been made to forget thinking it’s fiction.

Richie diffuses the ugly bits by changing a few names, keeping the stories so close to identical he balks at his lack of creativity. He fills his planner with town names where children’s mottle his backlogs of calendars. Where he writes Afton, Oklahoma, he highlights “Ledington” underneath to keep the names straight. Two fires hit Afton six months ago, and only one reached the papers. eight months ago a flood hit. Richie’s life wasn’t the best example, but he assumed catastrophes couldn’t strike so sequentially in nature. 

He has a whole list of towns like Afton, small and cataclysmic, all lined up. Each week of his planner holds one town, miles plotted out carefully and allowing for sleep. Between the towns Richie marks libraries and museums on the maps. After killing a man in a library museum hybrid, one would expect him to be adverse, but execute a clown and a man is nothing.

The first museum planned occupies only nine hundred square feet. It acts as a monument to the Marvelwood School. As Richie knows, anything about a boarding school feels haunted. After watching  _ Dead Poets Society _ once, he learned that. Horror aside, that is Kent, Connecticut, where Eddie first appeared. 

Saved on his desktop, Richie plays and replays the clip of Eddie standing there, studying the blood clinging to his shirt. Richie practically read a first year Medical textbook trying to date how long it took until a stab wound mended to the degree of Eddie’s in the broadcast. Now at the point where he discerns the difference in each color of brick on the school's facade, Richie is ready to drive there. All that’s left is recording the first episode.

\---

Three days into his research, Richie had come to a realization. Writing a book just wouldn’t cut it. First off, the concept of himself sitting down and busting out 300 pages was ludacris. The idea’s bare bones contained value: write what he does, and maybe someone would remember. Those who forgot like Bill had, knowing only in subconscious flashbacks that they committed to word could read, too. 

Back in Richie’s two semesters and a summer in college, Richie read far too much  _ Star Trek  _ meta. The fanboard authors dug pages in hypothesising what came next and providing fanlore for every one-off detail. When the ideas ran out, some weirdo on the internet with somehow more time on their hands than Richie could be his saving grace.

He had to hope those people like Bill, who wrote what their memories missed, wrote meta too. Hopefully not pon farr meta, but real analysis of his real story and figure it out. That means Richie needs to read shitty fan theory of his own trauma, but anything would be better than playing on a roulette board of guesses when all his research finally ran out.

The other problem was that he needed immediate results, not a year’s wait of publishing drama then another six months for people to actually read it then three for fan communities to pop up. Instead, he settled on what every other B list comedian out of a job does: make a podcast. 

Richie’s manager loved the idea of him doing a podcast, loved the idea of him doing something, anything. Of course Steve would, Richie joked to him; Richie would finally be making him money again. Over the phone, Steve paused, then let out a sigh. An almost cruel joke to those who almost love you. He hadn’t seen Richie in months, but his signature sigh never changed. 

Despite his original appreciation, the more Richie explained, the more Steve disapproved. Driving cross country to locations and documenting the journey, all researching for the podcast. As Richie described it, the approach was a new performance art creating a realism behind the story. He could never jump the shark if he was always moving.

Steve described it more as a midlife crisis than innovative writing, but he eventually agreed. After years of touring, Richie knew the lazy boredom of the road, and sitting at home, as he’d been doing post stage-fright panic attacks, lacked the healing touch everyone originally expected. Getting back in action, burying himself in work could be just what he needed. Despite how crass it sounded, Richie lost a lot of money refunding all those tickets when he lost it. He could do with earning some back.

“The whole time on the road, you’re going to keep in touch, right?” he asked, more serious than a guy like Richie could handle. That’s why he hired him in the first place. He needed a man who could give a conclusive yes or no to anyone, including him.

“Yeah man, of course. I’ll call.” Richie said, trying to sound committal.

“We both know that’s a lie.” replied Steve, somehow not sounding exhausted in the way Richie knew he was.

“Woah, way to call a man out. Not nice, Steve.” He was right, but still.

“You didn’t hire me to be nice. When I call, you answer.” There was a pause. “Promise me, Richie.”

“Yeah, I promise.” He said it quietly, the way he did when forced into sincerity.

“Good. You’re coming in Wednesday. I’d tell you to clear your calendar, but I know for a fact you don’t have one.”

“Haha. I have a calendar.” And it’s true, Richie did, all nice and adorned with the dates of child deaths. Felt just like being a kid again, surrounded by the knowledge of small town children dying.

But Steve knew him differently. “I mean one from this year, Rich,” he said, in a way only someone who hadn’t watched a clown die could. 

And that was it. On Wednesday, Richie went in, and they planned, sat down together and wrote and wrote. It was the first time in years Steve read any of his writing, the first time in years Richie wrote anything to be read.

The process was strange, and watching Steve read it even stranger. As a manager, Steve was used to reading fuck all in front of people, but Richie, as a flop comedian who told other people’s jokes, rarely watched anyone read his. To Steve’s credit, he didn’t tell Richie to fuck off and stop staring. To Richie’s, well, he gets no credit.

He had a lot of notes, nitpicks on grammar, slight changes to increase sentence variance, and a question: “Are you okay?”

“I mean it, Rich. Are you okay? I know you lost a friend, and something weird happened when you left that you refuse to tell me about.” Richie tried to shrug it off, but Steve kept going. “I’m not going to pry because I know you’ll just make some joke and brush it aside, but I need to know right now, are you okay?”

“Yeah. Fuck, I’m fine,” Richie exhaled.

“You can tell me if you aren’t. I don’t want you disappearing off the face of the Earth again.”

“I’m not going to,” he said in an honesty that felt foreign. “I’m gonna answer when you call, every time while I’m on the road.”

“If someone asks you what all this is about, the podcast, the traveling, everything, are you gonna be able to answer?” Back to business with Steve. Richie liked that about him, only so long he would put Richie on the spot before going back to a comfort zone.

“I’ll figure something out.” Even back to business, that was the best Richie got.

“Okay. No interviews, no explanations, we’re playing this straight. You remember how they advertised  _ The Blair Witch Project? _ ”

“Yeah. That was fucking sick. I was so stoked to see that.” And, indeed, at twenty-three he was.

“Good. Play it like that, and you don’t have to answer any questions. Also, don’t fucking touch Twitter.”

\---

“Eddie Isn’t Dead: a fictional story about small towns and places where bad things happen.”

The messages are out, the label set, the creative license paid for. Fuck, he’s even got a logo, which luckily a freelance graphic designer made and not him. Everywhere he touched it said it: “Eddie Isn’t Dead.”

For accuracy purposes, Richie decides to record the first episode on his kitchen table. The episode acts as exposition, leaving the actual start of his journey for the next. Here he is, talking in riddles about Derry.

On the first recording, he cries. He says the word Eddie and sobs. It took him days to plan the script, send it to his manager for approval, get the go ahead. In all that time, it hadn’t prepared him to say his name. 

Two takes, and he gets not two sentences in before his voice wobbles, breath hitches, throat closes. He can’t say it. Even off microphone, he’s too scared to try. Instead, he changes the name to “Aaron.” 

Pausing the microphone and sighing, he thinks about Bev going to a therapist and healing. Just a few days ago, what he told the Losers when he explained the podcast was accurate. As he lied to them, he said “everyone heals differently.” But same as a joke, with every lie, a foundation of truth needs to stand behind it and stop it from being transparent. At least some of those movies are right, Richie hopes, when they say talking about stuff helps. So he begins, telling the world all of his truths as he reads them like a lie. Who knows, if all ends, if he doesn’t find anything, if he hallucinated everything in an alcohol fueled craze and a detox stupor, if there was no Eddie, then maybe Arron can live.


	2. Interlude: How We Get There

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Richie leaves for Kent and has to examine how he got to where he is in the first place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi! remember when i said i'd publish once a week? well that was a fucking lie. but you all read the first chapter so you already kno i got mental illness.  
> triggers for this include:  
> mentions of drug abuse, car crashes, child death, and lots of coping! (the good time)  
> also, it discusses the effects of being an lgbt kid and the fear that comes with being in the closet.  
> alright, i hope you all enjoy!

_ “Hey Aars,” the podcast starts. “I’m talking to you. I’m waiting on a response you know. [pause] I’m waiting for you to yell ‘Don’t call me Aars!’ like a fucking Red Robin’s commercial where you’ll jump out of hiding just to say ‘yum.’” _

\---

  
  


Recent events have expanded Richie’s list of titles: stand-up comedian, monster hunter, homosexual, friend. Most recently, he owns that of ‘writer’, and as a writer, he employs his diction to try and find the precise definition of “long as fuck.” It doesn’t feel particularly writerly to say “long as fuck,”, but he still hasn’t taken up Bill on his offer for writing advice, so maybe he’s stuck like this. But he’s a few to many hour into boredom, might as well try again.

If not for the windows on each side of him, the windshield would convince him it was a movie screen. But twelve minutes in, the motion picture turns to B-Roll. And after a fucking lifetime (two hours and twenty-seven minutes!) of beauty, flowery praises mean nothing. William Charles Dickenbrough and his windbag prose are gone. Richie can describe it all in six words, let a good writer rot.

“The roads are long as fuck,” he mutters to himself, testing it out.

And they are; lonely in a way only recently discovered by Richie. He was by no means staring at a blank wall for nearly twenty-three years. He was an award winning comedian, for fucks sake. But having people he could proudly go home to releases a new yearning each time he chose not to. 

With no doubt in his mind, Richie knows he has to take this road. He has to bring Eddie home, whichever one he deigns to go to. 

“The roads are long as fuck,” Richie tests out again. 

Maybe, he can just limit that to the road he’s on. Richie MapQuest’ed this, like it's 2004 and he’s on his way to a niece's soccer game. He doesn’t quite know where that analogy came from (another comic’s act maybe?), but he does know that he got the directions and printed them out, on paper, like some kind of barbarian living pre-GPS. Even back then, he saw the hours this journey was predicted to take listed on screen yesterday evening when he looked it up and then again on paper as he printed it out before getting into the car. It shouldn’t surprise him to look at the hours and dread the drive.

“The roads are long as fuck,” he says, more confidently. “And there’s no one to tell me to shut the fuck up.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


\---

  
  


_ “I hope these air waves reach hell because I’m going there and back to find you. Literally going through Death Valley, right now. And let me tell you, the valley between your mother’s thighs wasn’t even this sweaty. That being said, she gave me her fax number. Might just hit her up. I can go down on her on my way down to hell. I know, I know. All on my own there’s no one to tell me to shut the fuck up. Come out here and make me, Aaron.” _

\---

  
  


As opposed to being stuck in California, driving through the Rural West really is like those Toyota commercials, just a long, straight road where people most likely could drive 90 miles an hour. For a while, Richie does before he realizes how much gas that wastes. Sports Cars: sexy. Their gas intake: not. And Richie holds a genuine aversion to running out of gas or overheating his engine in the middle of nowhere.

Hour three and the drive feels a bit like staring at a blank wall, and that’s before the fact that he can’t even make a phone call for longer than three minutes before he loses service again. Or stream his seventeen “Driving East” Spotify playlists because he made the mistake of deleting but the Limp Bizkit remixes from his downloads. Nothing else to do and against his better judgment, Richie sits and thinks.

Not for the first time, it hits him that it’s not the road making him feel this way. He’s lonely, really, fucking lonely. Despite the loneliness following him for what he now realizes was all of his adult life, he never noticed it the way he does now, on this road. Maybe he just never had the comparison he does now, knowing what else there can be. Maybe he just didn’t have the vocabulary.

Yet, through the years of adulthood and travel and comedy tours, all the way leading up to the one he bombed less than a year ago, the loneliness on the road never hit too hard. The other people touring with him—the people he opened for, the people who opened for him, roadies that comedians had for some reason—always cracked jokes about “a girl in every port.” Well, obviously that wasn’t true; he told those jokes in his act. But they had a point; after the performance, occasionally before one, he disappeared for hours. 

Early in his career, there were parties and coke and girls to buy drinks for. That was fun, having the money to do it. And with the coke, the good shit, it didn’t even feel like a chore. Later tours he would find a guy, nice and secret. For a few hours he wouldn’t even be alone. Those nights between stages, the nights after them, he rode a nice high. He had no aim. It was funny, the feeling of living for absolutely nothing. No expectations. It was epic. 

It took years before he knew to name that feeling ‘desolation.’ He gained a purpose for his life—finding Eddie, bringing him home. Finally, a reason to be after all those years without it. But he had to trade for that purpose. He found a form of unconditional love that he hadn’t known since childhood. Now, he lost something else—not Eddie, he never had him—he lost the old need to prove something. The Losers loved him: unfunny, uncool, ugly as shit. If he went broke and they had to pay for all of his drinks, they would still love him. They may not actually pay for his drinks, may give him a Shirley Temple, but that was a new kind of love.

But he can live without them for a bit. He did it for years; hard as it is, he can do it again.

Steve used to get him Shirley Temples, too. It was a bit Steve played for them often: They’d go out to dinner and discuss things, mostly business, and beforehand he would slip the waiter $100 to keep all Richie’s drinks virgin. Steve always thought he could hide that smirk when the waiter insisted they ran out of bourbon before bringing some to the next table over. But that was just so he wouldn’t have to deal with an unruly client. And, hey, Richie had to respect that. Getting someone else to do his dirty work—not that he wouldn’t tell Richie so himself—always seemed to give him a sense of pleasure, and the comedian in Richie would always let him have it. At least until they set down in the new city and he performed his show. Steve didn’t need him after that, and Richie would find a nice bar every place they went and drink until he felt like he could stop existing.

The cities ended, though. They finished touring; Richie went home; Steve went to the next client and emailed him about what merch contracts to sign. Richie thought about calling his mom. He never once thought about going to his mom’s house in Tampa.

He checks Twitter.

\---

  
  


_ “As a non-convicted criminal, I would like to thank everyone who posted photoshopped images of me on Twitter. I am not technically allowed to check Twitter, but as an adult man and law-unabiding citizen I have. So, yeah, I’ve seen the pictures of me soaking in blood and sewage. If real images show up, no way they’ll make it to court. Thanks everyone for helping me bury evidence. The person who put the shit emoji in my hair, you are a creative genius. I’d add you to my creative team but I work alone now and also try very hard not to talk to anyone who doesn’t already know I’m annoying. I could not handle that level of rejection right now. _

_ “Also, the person who posted an edit of some clown, uhh.. Adam @baghdadjester, I’m 40, so I don’t know what “kin” or “C-L-C” means, but I’m an admitted murderer of both men and clowns, not of children, so like… between an ugly haired 5-head and an ugly haired 7-head, I’d choose me. _

_ “shit, probably shouldn’t have said that kids full name.  _ Steve _ or the dude or, like, woman who  _ Steve _ pays to edit this, can you bleep that shit out.” _

\---

  
  


It’s been months, and time comes down to him in little moments, not falling but popping up one at a time. It’s not that he doesn’t know what happened to him for twenty-two and a half years as much as he isn’t conscious of that knowledge. 

He asks himself a question, he searches back for an answer, and he knows the whole story attached. His brain supplies a new memory fitting into the crossroad of what he already knew. He had parents, he had friends. Now, he adds a tack to the time his parents took him to the hospital when his nose bled for two hours straight, wrapping the red string around a pushpin of Eddie tackling him to the ground. Richie remembers sitting on the grass and watching him. Still covered in dirt and grass, Eddie put on the prissiest face he had and pinched Richie’s nose leaning his head back and telling him to  _ shut the fuck up  _ everytime he reccomended a heist at Keene’s Farmacy.

He asks himself a question, he searches back for an answer, and he knows the whole story attached, including the ones he doesn’t want to. 

\---

  
  


_ “Aaron, and now I guess faithful listeners, you know I’m a piece of shit. I haven’t called my family to explain to them why I bombed a performance where I get paid a lot of money to be unfunny to instead drive to my hometown and… reconnect with old friends. I feel like this podcast should be mildly concerning to them, but like, they know me enough already. Like, In early 1990, the winter after some wild shit went down, my sister came home from college to tell me I needed therapy.  _

_ “Technically, she came home for a holiday, but everything is about me… Anyway, she told me to go to therapy and almost paid for it herself, so I think she already knows I have some childhood trauma. I figure that means she doesn’t need to be told about this podcast, or called more than once a year. _

_ “But, Aaron, you were there for all that. You watched it happen and lived it, and told me a therapist isn’t a real doctor because they don’t have M.D.'s, just fake doctorates  _ if they even have that type of qualification _. You got in a fight with Ben over it. It feels like there’s nothing you didn’t see, but here I am telling you everything and begging for you to listen.  _

_ “This was supposed to be about my sister. Did you know someone once told me I had adult ADHD  _ which is more embarrassing than normal ADHD _? Back to my sister. We’re siblings, so I feel like I should shit talk her more. One time when she was in eight grade..” _

\---

  
  


Some September around 2004 he toured Florida. On Yom Kippur, he called his mom from his hotel and told her how great he was finding Chicago. He checked the city’s weather online and told her how much he was enjoying that day's wind, but he promised to stay inside. She was right, catching a cold from the rain was no way to spend a holy day. And he did stay inside. Bringing a man back to his room felt like a worse day to spend a holy day.

Hotel rooms always feel off: the pillows are never right, the blankets have a weird texture, and a million people he will never know have spent a million nights on them. If Richie bothered to use the knowledge he learned from junior year pre-calc, he would know that a million nights is two-thousand years. Too bad he only recently remembered high school. Too bad he’s also been in a million hotels.

In the beginning, when he was just making his start, Richie would hear the people he opened for tell jokes about who they were in high school, and think  _ Fuck, was I doing coke in high school too?  _ But using hard drugs as a teenager is a different sort of trauma. 

At least, he knew in some way he was traumatized. Not consciously, but if he thought too hard about what it meant that he “partied” even when alone, he would have realized. At the very least he knew something was irredeemably wrong about how he grew up. When his mom left his childhood home to move to Florida in the late 90’s, he still never visited. It wasn’t where he grew up, but something still scared him about staying under his parents roof. She would never hurt him, but he never stopped fearing the idea of going back to the habits of childhood. 

The more Richie thought, the more he realized: unknowingly, he never banned his habits, never lost himself fully. He kept the same glasses from his childhood, put them back on the same way he would when Eddie kicked them off. Found people who made fun of his tacky shirts the way Bev would but fixed his collars anyway—it didn’t matter if they would leave. Every once in a while, he sat down in a coffee shop in Chicago that played the sort of old records that Mike would. A man there told him summaries of all the stories he was typing up. The man, Brady he learned, always said he liked Richie's input. 

Talking to him felt so nice. Each time he went, he got to see the frown and slight bite of the lip when Brady concentrated. Richie would buy him an orange scone whenever Brady turned into the letter C, elbows on the table as he wreaked havoc on his keyboard and back. When he finally put out his first book, they popped champagne at Brady’s place. Richie moved to LA.

\---

  
  


_ “I’ve been driving too long. Let’s start a fight: West Coast best coast. California is better than New York, and LA is way fucking better than Manhattan.  _

_ “If you were here, I’m sure you’d yell at me. No shock there, this is a car, your favorite place to scream. You’re like a little yappy dog the way you stick your head out the window. I think it might be my favorite thing, watching you stick your head entirely out of the window to yell at some poor small town fuck for not speeding up to make a yellow light. And you weren’t even driving.  _

_ “You’re a fucking innovator Eh–uh, Aaron, inventing backseat roadrage. I’m not going to lie, you’re backseat driving is why you are never allowed to drive.  _

_ “It’s okay, we don’t need the thrill of watching you scream your way through a three-point-turn. Just being near you is thrill enough. You can’t see it, but I’m winking.” _

\---

Steve calls, as he said he would, informing Richie of the podcast's launch. They expected success. Hell, the marketing campaign was so big even Bill noticed it, and his Twitter is explicitly reserved for announcing books, announcing book adaptations, and being informed that his books suck. From Steve’s excitement, the launch was huge.

For everyone else, it must have been an involved process. Richie, however, bounced. He recorded it in one take, sent the audiofile, and left. According to Twitter, recording it in one take was powerful, and every sigh or need to stop acted as a testament to his talent. Which, before reading the reviews, Richie didn’t realize he needed to take so many breaks. It’s like counting the times someone says “Um.” Dick move. That’s not what Steve says, though. In fact, Steve immediately regrets mentioning Twitter. 

“Richie, Richie, do not text and drive.” He loves it when Steve’s voice gets all nasally. 

“As if I haven’t seen you do it a thousand times,” laughs Richie.

“I’m a better driver than you.” Moot point. “Do you want to talk business with me or not.”

One must show respect for the long-suffering, Richie thinks. “Why do you sound like that? I’m making you money, dude.”

“First of all,” Steve starts in his exasperated way, “business wise, you’re still in the red from cancelling everything. Don’t get cocky. Second, responses are good. You’re making me money.”

“I know. I checked Twitter.” From behind the phone, Richie can feel Steve putting his head in his hands. Each conversation they have reminds Richie of how much he loves Steve’s long-suffering personality, and with each conversation Richie seeks to preserve it, if not by words, then at least by actions. 

Talks change from Twitter to add sales and merchandising, who gets the best interview, who will pay the best for one. 

“Gonna be hard to make a statement, Steve. I’m not sure I’m ready to tell people what I saw in a clown's mouth, and my male tears aren’t as charming in person. No matter how the girls ask for them.” 

“We can do it over the phone. Whatever, just keep recording.”

Richie keeps driving, now going through Utah. Maybe he can find something to record despite being in the middle of buttfuck nowhere.

\---

  
  


_ “I went to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting once, just to see what it’s about. After they said ‘Hi my name is Jimmy, and I’m an alcoholic,’ and we all said, ‘Hi Jimmy’—fuck, forgot the anonymous part. I’m kidding about the Jimmy part. His name was Fred. _

_ “But forreal, after the ‘Hi, my name is’ bullshit, they said you stop maturing when you experience your trauma. For most of them, that meant drinking. I can’t stop thinking about whether it was the clown or losing you. That is, the first time. I feel older now than I have in decades, fucking too old for my bones, man. Aged a thousand years. That’s a joke. I feel forty-one. For those of you who aren’t good at math, or who just don’t give a shit about me, I’m forty.  _

_ “I think the first time IT gave me a missing poster, told me it knew my secret I stopped. I just, fucking. Stopped. But then we survived and huddled around in a fucking circle holding hands, and I felt okay. Then, there was the first time I lost you, completely. Every day, I wondered, ‘Does someone know my secret. If they do, I’m gonna throw myself off a fucking bridge.’ After that whole episode and going to AA and going a few more times, I stopped doing coke. But I didn’t get that shit. Those chumps going to non-work meetings—I mean, meetings you aren’t even paid to go to? Who does that? Bunch of baloney if you ask me. Because I stopped snorting shit, and we all watched my Netflix special. I still didn’t grow up.  _

_ “Aaron, I remember you. I may not have cut down on my dick jokes, but my pussy jokes have really taken a backseat. How can I lose you a second time, and all of a sudden grow up.” _

\---

  
  
  


Tweet one: is richie tozier sexy: a thread.

Reply 1: no.

[End Thread]

Okay, that one was funny. Richie likes it. 

He then remembers that his likes are public, and he will look like an asshole to this random 19-year-old. Which publicly, he is an asshole, so what he looks like doesn’t matter. That being said, does he actually want to be an asshole, especially to someone with pronouns in their bio? Because he knows his twitter makes him look like the type of douche to make fun of that.

She doesn’t follow him for obvious reasons, but her DM’s are open. “listen. i want to make sure u know that me liking that was not passive aggressive. it was funny as fuck. thank you.”

“y’all r so dumb. another c-list male comedian makes a podcast & u start stanning a misogynist bc he shows 2 emotions” Richie keeps scrolling.

ArtfullyUnhelpful tweeted a Spotify link to “songs that richie would cry in his cars to.” Richie somehow, its oddly comforting to know that a bunch of strangers are imagining him crying. So much so that there’s another tweet about it too:

“normally im not a fan of seeing a grown man cry but apparently im a fan of hearing it #EddieIsntDead” 

Someone below it replied with a fancam that matches the tweet. That one, listening to the audio of himself crying over alternating photos of himself drinking, it's not helpful to the cause. Richie keeps scrolling.

Someone else tweets a link to an article, calls it meta. Almost he screams “Thank you c0mmies1ken!” out the window. It looks like everything he was looking for, and wants to scream his thank you’s, until. He reads the article.

**SEEKING OUT THE TRUTH THROUGH RICHIE TOZIER’S ANALOGY**

**Richie Tozier, alternatively known as Trashmouth Tozier, recently admitted to living life under a persona. In a fictionalized podcast, he recounts the events leading up to his public breakdown then mysterious disappearance. He starts by explaining that he forgot his entire childhood, then expressing the deep trauma he and a group of friends faced. After that, he describes the process of regaining all his childhood memories when reuniting with his childhood friends, killing a man, and then them coming together to kill what first gave them the trauma. As he defeats the monster that haunted him starting in childhood, he loses his best friend. The episode ends with seeing said friend on the news in places far from him, and Tozier vowing to scour the country in order to find him again.**

**While the events of the story are contentious, the further in depth Tozier goes into his childhood, the less fictional the story becomes. Richie Tozier did grow up in Maine in a town with a murder rate 40% higher than the rest of the state and a higher rate of unsolved cases. When Tozier was 13, a total of 7 children went missing in a single year, including the younger brother of author Bill Denbrough, though not directly named in the series, who has continuously promoted Tozier’s podcast on Twitter.**

**According to Tozier, all the kids who were killed or went missing were actually eaten by an alien clown. A clown who then tried to do the same to him and his friends. Even without that, the story follows the horrors of childhood isolation, bullying, and independant traumas.**

**This podcast allows Tozier to tell a story he prefers in which the hate he suffered came from the influence of an alien and not the hearts of the people around him. The person who killed children then tortured and attempted to kill him was just a monster, one who had to torture and kill to feed, so no one needs to understand why someone could do something so horrible. The person Richie kills in a library isn’t the murderer, just a man who tried to hurt his friends but couldn’t because a person, brandishing a weapon or not, could never truly hurt his friends. The thing he fights a second time who manages to kill Aaron was once again a monster instead.**

**But what does it mean to tell a better story? In it, children still die, he still has to fight a monster, the person who does not fight still dies, and a man who does dies too. In the end, he wins a second time but still comes out more broken than he went in. He wins, but he loses his best friend.**

**However, one has to wonder if this is also a nicer story. The best friend is a man with short brown hair, big eyes—something akin to a smaller and younger version of himself despite being the same age—and a name that Richie cannot seem to settle on, alternating between Aaron, Eddie, and nicknames for the two. Regardless of his name, this is the person who after 25 years shows Tozier what he was as a child, who he was as he developed into an adult and who he lost when he became one. When Aaron or Eddie or whatever name Tozier can decide on at the moment leaves, Richie is left hollow again but this time with no shield to hide it.**

**But that is not the end of the story, and that hope is not lost. As Tozier finishes the story of all his trauma, he sees what he lost on a TV screen. In his plan to find this friend, he goes back to places that remind him of his childhood—places surrounded by fear—but with the newfound power of adulthood and of knowledge to survive them. In this, he goes back into childhood to find himself.**

  
  


Fuck. It’s not like there weren’t tweets agreeing with this, agreeing that he’s repeating old steps going back into childhood horrors. But fuck that author, he isn’t running away. He’s running towards something just like Bev said, and he’s done thinking about himself. Eddie is real, and Richie is getting back a real person. Also, he’s pretty sure she got her timeline wrong.

He hates that the Daily Whatever person got something right though, he couldn’t handle losing Eddie, so he made a new story where he lost Aaron instead. Worse, he made it with the intention that Aaron could live if Eddie couldn’t, he could save a fake person if he couldn’t fucking manage a real one. 

Because he is a rational and sane person, he closes that fucking tab and reads something else. Twitter and it’s 140 character limit only.

\---

  
  


_ “I got called out for queer-baiting. Had to google that shit, political activism isn’t really my thing. That being said, I have a lot of thoughts on the matter. Keep listening, I have an episode coming up where I announce my first LGBT character to be added into this show. Shit, that’s not even funny. I don’t know why I’m laughing so hard. I’m wheezing. This feels like high school, where everyone argues about whether I’m gay or not and decides to beat the shit out of me. Only, this time they want to beat me up because they think I’m not gay, and when they call me a ‘queer,’ it’s progressive. _

_ “You guys really gotta stop with this shit. I’m serious. I realize I’m travelling the country in my car, so Twitter stans can’t charge my house and kill me, but this arguing over whether I’m gay or not is gonna make me crash my fucking car.” _

\---

  
  


It took hours, and he cried at least 3 times on the way, but Richie makes it to Kent, drives all the way up to Marvelwood School. The name isn’t an exaggeration because, Fuck. This place is creepy as shit. It’s 9:30 pm, and Richie isn’t going to die tonight. That’s an exaggeration,obviously; it’s an objective fact but stating it seems dramatic. He’ll drive off the campus, find a hotel for the night, and wake up in the morning. He has shit to do.

\---

  
  


_ “How long’s it been? Doesn't matter, I don’t do the editing. I’m gonna end the way I always do: Hey, Eds.” _

  
  


END EPISODE II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> honestly, when i posted the first chapter, i was really proud of it. however, it didn't get a lot of comments, so i thought everyone hated it. but i did get comments and they really brought me out of my funk, so thank you very much to the people who commented ! also thank you to lynne who inspired me to publish this today !
> 
> if this was a bummer go check out my standup fic "Go Gay Marry A Hypochondriac, The World Can Be Yours!" or my bachelorette fic "Why Are You Even Here?"

**Author's Note:**

> This started because I got writer's block on my Bachelorette AU fic. Originally, I was just gonna write a few paragraphs and go back to it, but I got emotionally attached. Big change from Richie pretended to be straight and going on reality TV to get free drinks.


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